Have a forgotten all my dreams? The lack-of-study I have done in preparation for these exams suggests I'm probably still pretty like, winsome and carefree and shit. However I also spent the morning looking at housing term deposits. SHEEET.

Wed, Apr. 27th, 2011, 09:49 pm

The Swedish Royal Family turned down a gift from the Absolut vodka factory of one of their iconic bottled made out of some kind of semi-expensive material. They turned it down because they only accept gifts of symbolic value.

Now everyone wants to be the person who least cares about prince william and Kate Middleton. The point that is interesting to me is the intersection of kitsch and political significance that it represents. How do we reconcile the cutesy coverage of their nuptuals with our knowledge that they are the likely future heads of state of our country, and for people in the UK, a hyperpriveledged bulwark of social stratification and the beneficiaries of the taxes of poor people.

The primary means by which they're about to maintain that crazy position at the locus of an influx of personal power and financial freedom is our collective consent-cum-apathy. But at the heart of it is our inability to imagine how a famous person can't be rich. There's something kind of perverse about a famous person being poor. Not poor on paper, but poor enough to live in a crap house and have to work a crap job.

Tue, Jun. 29th, 2010, 08:04 pm

Why would you, on receiving two (2) emails as well as a long-winded verbal request, fail to begin altering an account enabling your charge to compose an invoice until 5 minutes before said charge was rostered to drop the clamouring vicissitudes of work and go home? And why, on sighting your empoyee leaving the office would you make a facial microexpression of distaste at his leaving, because it sent the invoice-responsibility cascading into your hands like a swarm? of bees? bees repelled by the bitter nocturne that was the non-rosteredness of the employee? Because it was your fault entirely and not his at all? Why would the employee let that microexpression haunt him for the rest of the day?

"Because it's becoming gentrified! Independent vegan co-ops are moving out and chain stores are moving in. The community is being broken up"

I think this is the pervading sentiment among the mohawk set these days. It's also a sentiment I can't stand.

It's ironic than in trying to defend its geographical coherence the Newtown alternative community contradicts what it is supposed to stand for. By arguing that it has a right, above other communities, to inhabit a particular space renders it far more a shadow of the mainstream than an enlightened alternative. And not just a shadow of the mainstream, but a shadow that is worse and more bigoted because it refuses to conceive that it may possess those qualities.

But what really annoys me is the sense of entitlement. I might be more willing to give the community some slack if it has done something in the past to stake a claim on the space. As the situation stands, it seems that people are defending their right to live amongst others with similar fashion choices, rather than the right of for their community to exist. Because really, how much of a community is it, if it refuses definition except in the most banal terms. It's a community that seems to only exist to compare itself (favourably) with the "mainstream" (whatever that is); it's alternative, different, queer.

But how coherent is a community that can only define itself by reference to something else? Has Newtown really come together properly in living memory around, oh, I don't know, a single political policy? It's a community that hangs its identity in a series of signals - fashion, swagger, aesthetic - that are likely empty signifiers to be coloured with whatever substance the onlooker desires to read. And those whose bodies don't project the right (empty) signifiers are rendered outsders. Let's be honest: the courthouse on a thursday night shares far more in common (in the openness of its community) with a North Shore bowling club than a meeting place for eccentrics. it's more Dresden than Rive Gauche.

And the influx of different people? I say, in the words of PJ O'rourke, "let them in". Open the flaking, 1920's terrace doors to anyone who wants. If it leads to a community that doesn't place so much important on clothing and swagger, then that's great. If not, then I struggle to see in concrete terms what has really been lost.

This pretty much only leaves the economic factor. The classical arguments against gentrification point to the replacement of 1) poor people and 2) people of colour with the white upper middle class. The problem with applying this argument to newtown is that 1) Newtown has always been inhabited by uni students with rich parents and 2) newtown is, and always has been, overwhelmingly white. And honestly I struggle to see much sympathy in Newtown for the working class. Half the people here have never been west of Marrickville. If the community really does possess the qualities of solidarity with the economically and socially disadvantaged, then moving out of Newtown would finally give them an opportunity to express it.

Mon, Jan. 18th, 2010, 10:43 pm

-Bushwalking with the queens in the blue mountains-Ferry to manly-Bondi Beach and walk to Coggee/Bronte-Vietnamese in Marrickville (Pho)-Emily Mulligan's tourist walk to opera house via botanic gardens-Drinks in the courthouse in the evening-national gallery and australian museum and MCA and maybe powerhouse-

People regress sometimes. I had a friend at university whose begun, over the past year, spending time primarily with this high-school nostalgia group. It's a shame. I guess I conceptualise uni-friendships as being of a different sort than the ones that characterise middle school. But this group of friends totally recreate the pecking order and self-centred-saccharine that comes off when you see a group of 13 year old girls get on the bus. There's the requisite head of this group - it's is the kind of histrionic gay guy whose preferred literary form is the tweet. Short, sharp, simple. And there's the strange one, flung out to the outer reaches, struggling to get back in, tagging along behind, squeezing into some kind of comprehensible box.

While any group can fall into the same kind of marketplace of status, I think that there's certain ways of interacting that legitimise and encourage it (privileging bitchiness, self-centredness, apathy, normativity, etc.).